Given the proliferation of the word, digital, amongst library communities it would be wise to discuss what the term, digital, represents. From an engineering perspective, digital technology, as its name implies, allows information to transfer via digits. These digits may take the form of ones and zeros that make up binary code, numbers that represent ...

“Successful technologies rely on social resources.” – Susan Brown The Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary methodology that spans departments, faculties, institutional divisions—including libraries—and nations. There are librarians practicing DH, DHers practicing librarianship, and many examples of successful collaborations between libraries and DH initiatives. It is therefore impossible to speak of “DH” as a singular ...

Academic libraries have engaged increasingly in both critical librarianship and critical pedagogy, calling, for example, for “a more critical praxis for ILI [information literacy integration],” (Baer) and exploring the intersections between critical information literacy and scholarly communications (Roh). The digital humanities sit at the nexus of these various conversations, as DHers—librarians and non-librarians—cast a critical ...

Situated in the Scholars’ Lab, a small, research-oriented unit within the University of Virginia Library, we have come to expect the question, “What is digital humanities and why is it in the library?” We have excellent resources and responses to engage that question as well as questions about digital humanities (DH) more broadly. Those questions ...

Many pieces on libraries and digital humanities focus on the library as a space, an organization, and an institution, with the roles of librarians typically understood as functioning primarily within that space.1 While librarianship is, obviously, most often practiced in the library, the perspectives, skills, ethics, and approaches librarians bring to digital humanities research and ...

Last year, I had a conversation where I felt especially articulate about the collaborative aspects of my work. “I don’t write code for people,” I explained, “but it’s important to me to work with them; not only because I enjoy that, but also because my goal for them to be able to learn about technology/digital ...

In The Archival Turn in Feminism, Kate Eichhorn notes that “…what might be properly described as ‘women’s archives’ or ‘women’s collections’ have long been governed by the teleological assumptions upon which most archival collections are structured, there is nothing necessarily teleological about the development of explicitly feminist archives and special collections” (Eichhorn, 2013, p.31). One ...

Support for digital humanities, either through a dedicated physical center or a collection of skilled positions under the “digital scholarship” banner, are increasingly found in libraries, rather than in departments. It is often argued that this is a practical move, since libraries facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. While the disciplines move to the library’s physical space, few ...

Introduction Whose voices are missing from the digital humanities (DH) and libraries discussions? The users. Both DH and librarianship are inherently connected with users, yet user voices, especially those arising from empirical studies, are often missing from planning, developing, and implementing initiatives related to digital scholarship. Humanists’ data management across the research lifecycle is a ...

How can metadata become the most cutting-edge type of library outreach? In this article, we explore how engagement in collaborative library-based digital humanities (DH) projects is proving just that at the University of Alabama. In traditional scholarship, researchers encounter, rely on, and benefit from the work of metadata librarians every day as they access catalogs ...

What are the points of contact between digital humanities and libraries? What is at stake, and what issues arise when the two meet? Where are we, and where might we be going? Who are “we”? By posing these questions in the CFP for a new dh+lib special issue, the editors hoped for sharp, provocative meditations on ...